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The third piece in my "Infield Fly Rule Trilogy," titled An Empirical Analysis of the Infield Fly Rule, is up on SSRN.
As the title suggests, I (with the help of seven FIU students, who all
seemed to enjoy themselves) conducted an empirical study of the past
four MLB seasons to find out the frequency of Infield Fly calls and the
effectiveness of the rule in avoiding dramatically inequitable
cost-benefit exchanges.

The earlier pieces can be found here, here, and here. The abstract of the new paper follows the jump.

Legal
scholars have written extensively about baseball’s Infield Fly Rule --
its history and logic, its use as legal metaphor, and its cost-benefit
policy rationales. This paper now conducts the first empirical analysis
of the rule, exploring whether the rule’s legal and policy
justifications are statistically supported. Based on a review of every
fly ball caught by an infielder in the relevant game situation in Major
League Baseball from 2010-2013, this paper measures the frequency and
location of Infield Fly calls and the effect the rule has on individual
games, all to determine whether the feared cost-benefit disparities that
motivate the rule would, in fact, result absent the rule. Ultimately,
the merits of the Infield Fly Rule cannot be measured empirically, at
least not without resort to some ex ante value judgments; the normative
conclusion one draws about these data depends on where one starts -- a
supporter of the rule and a skeptic both will find confirmation in the
information gathered in this paper. Nevertheless, the numbers shed
specific and interesting light on the realities of baseball’s most
unique and famous (or infamous) play.